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      Trump authorizes US military to take control of land at US-Mexico border

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      Donald Trump has authorized the military to take control of land at the US-Mexico border as part of the president’s broader efforts to crack down on undocumented immigration.The authorization came late on Friday in a memorandum from Trump to interior secretary Doug Burgum, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem and agricultural secretary Brooke Rollins, outlining new policies concerning military involvement at the US’s southern border.The memorandum, entitled “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions”, allows the US’s armed forces to “take a more direct role” when it comes to securing the boundary in question.“Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats,” the order claimed. “The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past.”The memorandum added that the Department of Defense should be given jurisdiction to federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60ft-wide strip that stretches over California, Arizona and New Mexico. Doing that would give troops stationed there the legal right to detain immigrants accused of trespassing on what in effect is an elongated base – and unauthorized immigrants would be held in custody until they could be turned over to immigration agents.Military activities that could be carried out on federal land include “border-barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment”, according to the memorandum.After 45 days, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will assess the “initial phase” of the order. But at any time, Hegseth could extend the amount of federal land included in the memorandum.The ordered military takeover excludes Native American reservations, according to the memorandum.Friday’s order is the latest step from Trump in his administration’s ongoing focus on immigration enforcement, which has involved declaring a national emergency on the southern border.On Thursday, a US federal judge ruled that the Trump administration was allowed to require people who are in the country but not citizens to register with the federal government, a requirement that advocates say hasn’t been universally implemented since it was enacted as a law in the 1940s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling comes after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the new requirement on 25 February, adding that those who failed to report could face fines or possible prison time.The DHS’s announcement was widely seen as a workaround of the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars US military troops from participating in most civilian law enforcement actions.One of the purported justifications for militarizing the US border most commonly cited by Trump and his Republican colleagues is that people crossing the border with Mexico without permission carry much of the fentanyl sold in the US. Yet official statistics show 90% of convicted fentanyl peddlers are US citizens. More

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      ‘It’s going to be messy’: Americans on how Trump’s tariffs are shaping their spending

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      A few weeks ago, Dane began stocking up on “paper products”, “cases of paper towels, toilet paper”, “piddle-pads” for their shih-tzu, and his wife upgraded from an iPhone 8 to 14.The 73-year-old in South Carolina said the purchases – which were made to get ahead of Donald Trump’s trade policies – reminded him of the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, when he scrambled to buy masks, gloves and toilet paper.“It’s scary,” Dane said. “Prices are going to go up because of tariffs … It’s going to be messy.”While campaigning last year, Trump constantly touted his love of tariffs. But it was not until his so-called “liberation day” on 2 April – where the president announced sweeping duties on incoming goods, punishing competitors, allies and small and developing countries alike – that he spooked global financial markets and provoked fears of spiralling inflation and stagnant growth.Amid a US government bond sell-off, the president paused his most eye-watering tariffs for 90 days, apart from China, whose goods are set to be hit with a 145% levy.Hundreds of Americans got in touch with the Guardian to share how the uncertainty is affecting their consumption habits.Dane, who is retired, worked as an entrepreneur with his wife most of his career before later becoming an English teacher. He said he was a Republican in the 1980s but is fearful about how the US is “not going the right way” under Trump, and is unhappy with his “dystopian” policies towards global allies, the economy, education, scientific research and more.View image in fullscreenCurrently, Dane is on a trip to Paris and plans to bring home consumer goods potentially hit by 10% tariffs on European Union imports.“We’ll probably be getting tea, bringing back some cheese, some butter,” he said. “I would love to bring back eggs but that would be a disaster. I’d have scrambled eggs in my suitcase.”Amid tariff uncertainty, Heather, a 61-year-old college professor in Texas, said she and her husband can mostly weather food cost fluctuations, but brought forward the purchase of a new car “inanticipation of price hikes”.She said they owned a 14-year-old Mini Cooper, which ran on gas, that they planned to replace with a hybrid vehicle at some point. They decided to replace their car now to avoid potential inflation – and reduce expenditure on gas.“The economic instability of the Trump administration certainly gives one pause,” she said. “It’s just so much instability, chaos and [the] unknown.”It’s a similar story for Stefanie, a 56-year-old educator and former tech worker in Nevada, who bought a Toyota Tacoma to replace her old Jeep as well as converting some investments into cash.Stefanie began strategizing about being more resilient to tariffs as soon as Trump was elected.“The one thing I learned in the first administration is to believe him: he says bizarre things, and then he does bizarre things,” she said.She’s cutting back on subscriptions and future travel plans, while stockpiling kitchen staples such as rice, cooking oils, vinegar and flour and replacing worn-out clothes including shoes and jeans, “before inflation hits”.“The supply chain is so globalized that tariffs really hit everything,” Stefanie said.But for Ishaan*, a 51-year-old engineer in Texas, the economic picture means he is abstaining from major purchases.“Everyone I know has started tightening their belts,” he said. “I am cutting out unnecessary expenses, cancelled my gym membership, focusing on savings.”The focus for Ishaan, who fears higher prices and an economic slowdown, is to build up his savings in cash. He feels “scared to invest in any stocks or bonds right now” amid market volatility.Likewise for Jonathan*, a 70-year-old in New Jersey, the financial fallout from Trump’s trade wars means he has been forced to rule out planned purchases and strip consumption back to the essentials.Jonathan said his individual retirement account (IRA) was initially “decimated” – although it ticked up slightly after Trump paused his tariffs on Wednesday. He said it was currently down about 15%.That means cancelling plans to redo the carpet in his house and replace two old televisions, Jonathan said. “In short, we’ll buy only necessities and pay bills until this stupidity ends.”Russ a 35-year-old physicist in New Mexico, said the Trump administration’s policies were “causing me to think about what kinds of spending behavior I could have done without this whole time”.He has an eight-year-old phone and nine-year-old MacBook computer that still work fine, which he will not be replacing. The prospect of runaway price rises for consumer electronics, often from China, have led him to reconsider: “Do I really need this, or do I just want this?“I see these things as being as much toys as necessities,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just go back to a dumbphone or something like that – I fantasize sometimes about not getting all these notifications all the time, like the phones we had back in 2005. But maybe that’s a Luddite fantasy.”Russ said that he was already boycotting Amazon and Target – companies that many feel have aligned themselves with Trump’s agenda such as rolling back their own DEI schemes. He’s trying to shop more at local, independent shops rather than “everything stores”, which he notes is more expensive and time consuming but ultimately worth it.“As an American citizen and registered voter, nobody really cares what you think until November of every other year, you feel kind of voiceless,” he said. “You think, well, if dollars are the only tools we have any more, then damn it, I’m going to cast those votes and allocate my spending accordingly.”View image in fullscreenLikewise, small business owner Christine* said the disruption could cause a wider re-evaluation of US consumer habits.Amid the uncertainty, Christine, 41, stocked up on supplies for her Miami acupuncture business for two years, and bought her son’s fifth birthday present – a bike – early for July. But she said she had already noticed less demand for her work.More broadly, the prospect of inflationary tariffs is accelerating Christine’s reconsideration of how much “stuff” she needs. She’s recently attended “these lovely parties” where friends bring unwanted clothes and they “switch it all around” rather than buying fast fashion.“I really resent being drafted into this mad trade war,” Christine said, “but if there is a silver lining, maybe it’s that at least some people like me will question their unsustainable capitalistic practices.”*Some names have been changed. More

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      ‘I’m super worried’: fewer UK tourists visiting US amid Trump’s policies and rhetoric

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      After backpacker Rebecca Burke was arrested and locked up for nearly three weeks by US immigration ­officials, she started urging people not to travel to America.Britons seem to have listened: the number of UK residents visiting the US was down 14.3% in March compared with the same month in 2024, official figures show.Analysts believe that Donald Trump’s claims that other countries were “cheating” Americans, and reports of deportations, may have had a chilling effect on travel to the US. But the March dip may be simply an early warning of a bigger fall in the summer, because tourists typically book holidays months in advance.“Once we get into July, August, September, most of those trips will have been booked,” said David Edwards, founder of the Scattered Clouds travel consultancy.“But if there is less global trade, there will be less international business travel. Business travel is booked with a much shorter lead time so if there is uncertainty, business travel could take a swifter hit.”Spring is difficult for travel companies to analyse because Easter moves in the calendar. So could the comparative drop simply be the effect of the Easter school holidays falling in March 2024? It seems unlikely, Edwards said, because the figures from the US National Travel and Tourism Office show an even bigger drop, of 16%, compared with March 2019 when Easter was on 21 April and Trump was nearing the end of his first term.Travellers from other countries also seemed to avoid the US in March – visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US were down 17% in March, year-on-year. German visitors were down 28.2% and Spanish ones down 24.6% compared with 2024. Overall, global travel to the US was down 11.6%. UK residents make up the largest number of overseas visitors to the US, with 3.9 million a year.View image in fullscreenTTG, the travel industry magazine, published a poll last week showing that two-thirds of travel agents it contacted believed there had been a downturn in bookings, while only 12% of operators said their business had not been affected. Demand for hotel rooms in the US may also be falling. Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality ­analytics at CoStar, which tracks hotel room occupancy, said that the strong dollar had led to an 8% fall in visitors in 2024.“So now with the rhetoric that’s going on, I’m super worried that we’re going to continue to see travel numbers below 2019, maybe even decelerating from 2024,” he said. “Saying ‘you’re cheating us, you have a ­surplus, so we’re going to put a ­tariff on you’ – that rhetoric is not very welcoming.”Research by VisitBritain in 2022 showed that international ­travellers ranked “destination is a ­welcoming place to visit” as the second most important factor in choosing a holiday.View image in fullscreenAfter publicity around deportations of tourists, including Germans and Australians, the UK and German governments have updated their travel advice to warn citizens of the risk. The incidents may also harm the appeal of the 2026 World Cup – currently due to take place in the US, Canada and Mexico, with the later knockout stages entirely in the US – and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, Freitag said.“Next year will be very big … If I’m a German father with two boys and I want to show them the World Cup, am I really going to spend $1,000 a pop on an airfare, plus hotel, plus the ticket, if there’s even a remote chance that I will not be able to make it into the country? I’m not going to take that risk. Not everyone will think that, but probably some people will.”Clare Collins, co-founder and chief operations officer for CT Business Travel, said that she expected there would be a decline in leisure travel to the US in the summer, but had not yet seen an impact on business travel.“We’re not seeing any dramatic effects yet for business travel, but that could change in two weeks,” she said. “I think [in] the long-term leisure market, people will choose to spend their money elsewhere.”If the March dip turns into a major fall in travellers from the UK, some airlines may start cutting routes, Edwards said, and that could have an impact on the British economy.The UK travel industry recovered from the Covid pandemic mostly because American tourists flocked to Europe, buoyed by a strong dollar that made hotels more affordable in London and Paris.“Europeans may be thinking ‘I’m not so sure that the US is a welcoming place to visit’,” Edwards said. “Equally, it might be that Americans are thinking ‘how welcome would I be if I go to Europe this year?’” More

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      ‘A new golden age’: how rightwing media stuck by Trump as global markets collapsed

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      While Donald Trump recently instituted and paused hefty tariffs, sparking a trade war and chaos in financial markets, most of the country’s conservative media either applauded the US president or critiqued the policy but not the person behind it, according to journalists and observers of conservative media.Meanwhile, economists, business leaders, Democrats and even some Republicans warned that the tariffs, which prompted the largest American stock market drop since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, could cause a recession.“News is what impacts the greatest number of people,” like tariffs and “the evaporation of wealth and the ripple effect on not just the US economy, but the global economy”, said Howard Polskin, president of The Righting, a newsletter and website that monitors conservative media. “By any stretch of imagination, that should be a lead story.”But the chaos of last week posed a serious challenge to many aspects of rightwing US media, which often acts as a largely unquestioning cheerleader for Trump and his Maga movement. The story was sometimes played down, sometimes cheered but rarely seriously questioned – even amid warnings of price rises, recession and cratering investments, especially precious 401(k) retirement accounts.The most popular conservative news source in the United States is Fox News, which has a much larger audience than CNN and the leftwing MSNBC network. Its hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, consistently praise Trump and bolster his inaccurate claims.But Fox News has faced new competition from Newsmax and One American News Network (OANN), networks that positioned themselves as even more reliable Trump supporters. The Wall Street Journal, which has the same owner as Fox News, features a right-leaning opinion section, but also has done lengthy investigations into Trump and Joe Biden and is a favorite among people in the financial sector.Rightwing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro also command a large audience through podcasts and social media.After Trump declared 2 April “liberation day” and announced that the country would on 5 April institute a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods and on 9 April start “reciprocal tariffs” on some of its largest trading partners, including a 34% tariff on imports from China and a 20% tariff on goods from the European Union, Hannity described it as “a day that will be remembered as a turning point and the start, I hope for every American, of a new golden age”.China retaliated with a 34% tariff. Global stock markets fell sharply; the Dow Jones industrial average declined more than 2,000 points over the next two days.Economists and leaders of financial institutions said that the tariffs increased the likelihood of a recession and inflation. Most Republican lawmakers stood behind the president; a minority, like Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, expressed opposition and said the tariffs amounted to a tax increase for Americans.While Fox Business, a sibling network, had guests who criticized the tariffs, Fox News personalities told viewers nervous about their investments that everything would work out well. A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for an interview.“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today,” Jeanine Pirro said on 3 April on the show The Five. “We’ve got to have manufacturing in this country … and Donald Trump is the only one who could do it because he’s got the biggest consumer base in the world. He’s not afraid of anybody.”Despite the market upheaval, the Fox News commentators were “in too deep” to break with Trump, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group.“They have, for nearly a decade now, sold their audience on the sense that Donald Trump would be a good president,” Gertz said 7 April. “Now he is single-handedly causing a worldwide market collapse,” but “they can’t abandon him”.Other conservative news organizations opted to focus on other issues. At one point on 8 April, the only story on tariffs on the OANN frontpage concerned the former speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her comments on tariffs in 1996.The network did interview Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist who Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Laffer said that if Trump kept the tariffs, he didn’t see how the country could avoid a recession, but he still “could not think of one person on Earth that I would prefer more to be president”.On 9 April at Newsmax, the headline of their main story read, “Trump: Tariffs Bring in $2 Billion a Day.”The actual number this month was about $200m, Reuters reported.“A lot of times it feels more like propaganda,” Polskin said of the cable networks’ coverage. “I find it all extremely alarming, the stock market and that consumers of rightwing media could be misled so egregiously.”Newsmax did not respond to the Guardian’s request for an interview.There are exceptions in the conservative media sphere. The Journal has criticized Trump and his tariff policy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Trump Owns the Economy Now. He can try to blame the Fed, but the tariff blunder is his alone,” was the headline of a recent editorial.Their editorial pages have been “characterized through the years as sort of the bastion of conservatism”, said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute. “They are not at all sympathetic to the tariff actions.”Shapiro, the rightwing pundit and a founder of the Daily Wire, devoted much of his podcasts after “liberation day” to scrutinizing the tariffs and questioned whether they could actually bring manufacturers back to the United States.But Shapiro reassured listeners that he supported the president.“What exactly is this designed to do?” Shapiro said of the tariffs during a 3 April episode of his podcast. “It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works. I’ve said this a thousand times: this is not coming from a place of I want Trump to fail.”Shapiro called for Trump to fire Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser who reportedly shaped the tariffs strategy. But, of course, it was Trump who instituted them.“In general, the rightwing media, they are like Republican politicians. They don’t want to cross Trump,” Edmonds said.Still, Aaron Rupar, a journalist who tracks speeches and interviews Trump and his officials give to conservative media, thought their coverage of the tariffs was “a little more honest” than their coverage of events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol or the trials Trump faced when he was out of office.“With financial data, it’s a little harder to gaslight people,” he said.Ultimately, hours after the reciprocal tariffs took effect, Trump announced a 90-day pause on them, except for China, whose tariff he increased to 125%.“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said afterwards, referring to Trump’s book. “You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”A day later, with stocks still down significantly from before “liberation day”, Ainsley Earhardt, a Fox News host, reiterated Leavitt’s point.“This is the art of the deal,” she said. “This shows how strong our president is.” More

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      These Tennessee lawmakers love the unborn. After birth? Not so much

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      Think of the children? NahYou’ve probably seen this quote from an Alabama pastor called Dave Barnhart. It goes viral all the time. But I’m resurfacing the quote because it is another day that ends with “y” in America, which means it is relevant once again.“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for,” Barnhart said back in 2018, remarking wryly on the movement’s priorities. “They never make demands of you … They don’t need money, education or childcare … They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”Over in Tennessee, there are a lot of lawmakers who are very proud of how much they advocate for unborn children. In 2022, as soon as Roe was overturned, the state passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans – one without explicit exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person. The ban also made performing or attempting to perform an abortion a class C felony – akin to aggravated assault – which means aiding in an abortion can land you prison time and a hefty fine. That ban has been continuously challenged in court but the bottom line is that getting an abortion in Tennessee is almost impossible.Those Tennessee lawmakers who love unborn children? Surprise, surprise, they’re not so keen on the born ones. Particularly if those kids are immigrants. On Thursday, the GOP-dominated state senate approved a bill that lets public schools check the citizenship or legal immigration status of every student. Undocumented children can be denied enrollment at these public schools or forced to pay tuition. In other words: Tennessee wants to make it legal to deny undocumented kids an education. By requiring school systems to check legal immigrant status, they’re also turning what should be safe spaces into immigration enforcement centers.All of which, to be clear, is blatantly unconstitutional. In 1982, the supreme court decision in Plyler v Doe found states cannot deny students a free public education over their immigration status. The Tennessee bill is not law yet, and if the Tennessee governor does sign it, it will almost certainly face legal challenges. But even if it eventually gets struck down, there is a chance it will stay on the books as a “zombie law” – ready to rise again when circumstances allow.Perhaps you are wondering why all these fierce advocates for the rights of unborn children are so keen on denying kids an education? According to lawmakers who voted for the measure, it’s not because they’re hateful racists who want to punish kids, it’s because they are being fiscally responsible. Their argument is that the state simply doesn’t have enough money for education for undocumented kids, particularly since some will require English language learner classes.There’s a small possibility – just throwing it out there – that one of the reasons Tennessee is finding it hard to find money for education is because its regressive tax policies are heavily weighted towards extracting money from the poor rather than making the rich pay their fair share. Tennessee is one of the nine states in the US that doesn’t have an income tax. It also doesn’t have inheritance tax and has very low business tax. Residents (including undocumented immigrants) pay sales tax, property tax and a grocery tax. Undocumented immigrants are putting money into the system and getting very little out of it. Pretending that this attack on undocumented children is about money is disingenuous. Deep down, I’m sure even the people voting for the bill know that investing in children pays dividends to society.Still, while it is disheartening that a bill like this got as far as it did, it’s also important to note that it faced a lot of opposition. Nearly half of the senate’s members spoke on the bill – many of them, including some Republicans, in passionate disagreement. There were tears and a lot of Bible verses quoted about compassion for children. As the US becomes increasingly dystopian, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of just how much opposition there is to the extremist policies and legislation a hate-filled minority are pushing through. Donald Trump likes to say that winning the popular vote gave him and his cronies a mandate to do whatever they like; that all the policies getting passed have the support of the people. This simply isn’t true. Only around 32% of eligible voters actually voted for Trump.While we must not minimize the amount of misogyny and racism there is in the US (and there is a lot!), we should also take heart from the fact that a sizable number of Americans do not want to live in an authoritarian dystopia where women have no rights and undocumented kids get no education. Sixty-three percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to Pew research from 2024. Most Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally if certain requirements are met. Increasingly, the actions of the American government don’t reflect the views of the American people.Which, of course, is why the Trump administration is so obsessed with undermining education as a whole. From trying to stop undocumented immigrants from going to school, to tightly controlling how Ivy League universities operate, to attempting to eliminate the US Department of Education, Republicans are waging a war on critical thinking.The US just made it harder for married women to voteOn Thursday the US House approved the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to prove they are citizens when they vote. If you changed your birth name – as around 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the US have – you will have to show a lot more paperwork to vote.Mickey Rourke tells JoJo Siwa he will tie her up and make her straightI had to look up who Rourke is because he hasn’t been relevant for a while. Now, however, he is making headlines for being misogynistic and homophobic on Celebrity Big Brother UK. Rourke, 72, recently told JoJo Siwa (a gay singer and social media personality) that he’d turn her straight. “If I stay [in the Big Brother house] longer than four days, you won’t be gay any more,” Rourke said to Siwa in a clip from Wednesday. “I’ll tie you up,” he added. Rourke got a warning from producers for his language but his comments were not censored. This is in stark contrast to a Big Brother “controversy” last year, when ITV, the broadcaster, edited an episode of the show to remove shots of a T-shirt worn by one of the contestants featuring a watermelon, which is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhite House says it will ignore reporters with gender pronouns in email signatureThe amount of time these people spend obsessing over pronouns boggles the mind. Get a hobby! Get therapy! Try thinking about literally anything else!Student found guilty of rape goes unpunished because of promising future in gynecologyA criminal court in Leuven, Belgium, recently found a 24-year-old medical student, who was training as a gynaecologist, guilty of rape but suspended his sentence because of his lack of prior offences and his “promising future”. This has sparked a lot of anger in Belgium and many commentators have drawn parallels to the Brock Turner case in the US.Does sitting behind a screen turn you into a woman?Fox News’s Jesse Watters, who sits behind a screen all day, seems to think so. This profundity comes after he declared public soup consumption unmanly and said that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands”.The week in pawtriarchyRemember those tariffs Trump imposed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins? Those penguins now have their own social media account, @PenguinsAgainstTrump. “What are you going to do, deport us?” one post reads. “We’ve been dealing with ICE for centuries.” More

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      Trump’s tariff mess raises the danger of a US default | Lloyd Green

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      “Trump backs down on tariffs, again. And it doesn’t look strategic,” a headline blared on Wednesday afternoon.At the end of trading, equities had recovered a portion of their losses. But plenty of damage had been done. Markets were thrown into turmoil, interest rates jumped and business activity took a hit. Beyond that, the possibility of a recession grew – and the possibility of a default by the US inched up to 6%, according to prediction markets.Meanwhile, Larry Summers, a treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, announced that a recession appeared imminent. “We are being treated by global financial markets like a problematic emerging market,” he posted on X. Also on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projected first-quarter growth to be negative 2.4%. By extension, tax receipts will probably have shrunk.Less money coming into the treasury’s coffers means that government could breach the debt ceiling sooner than already projected if Congress eventually fails to act. That is bad news for Donald Trump, the Republicans and the country.Before Trump transformed the economy into his personal yo-yo, the government stood poised to default on the nation’s $36tn debt sometime in between mid-July and early October, absent legislation. During the president’s walk on the economic wild side, the odds of a recession grew. Ditto the possibility of a default, a reality of which Trump is acutely aware.With Biden in the White House, Trump urged congressional Republicans to stymie efforts to lift the ceiling. “I say to the Republicans out there – congressmen, senators – if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” he announced. A default would also mean no social security checks for the US’s seniors.“And I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave, will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen. But it’s better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors.”In May 2023, the Biden administration brokered a compromise with the then House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, to increase the debt ceiling but limit spending. The deal came to cost McCarthy his gig as speaker.As president-elect, however, Trump began singing a very different tune. Suddenly debt didn’t matter. In a mid-December telephone interview, Trump urged Congress to scrap the ceiling permanently. “I would support that entirely,” he told NBC News. Apparently, what was sauce for the Democratic goose was not sauce for the Republican gander.“The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge.” Christmas came and went. Republican control of the Senate loomed with the new year.In late December, Trump went on the warpath, albeit to no avail. “The Democrats must be forced to take a vote on this treacherous issue NOW, during the Biden Administration, and not in June,” he thundered. “They should be blamed for this potential disaster, not the Republicans!”Nothing happened.Trump’s hopes for the debt ceiling now rest with the Republican-controlled Congress. Republican budget blueprints envision the ceiling being lifted through reconciliation, a process that bypasses the filibuster in the Senate and instead requires a simple majority vote in each chamber.Whether that happens anytime soon is an open question. Punters peg the chance of a pre-June increase of the debt ceiling at one-in-five. Congress loves procrastinating. Nothing focuses their attention like a crisis.Regardless, Trump’s tariff gambit leaves a pile of economic debris, including the market for US bonds. After his flip-flop on tariffs, Trump suggested that the sell-off in the bond market had forced his hand.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The bond market is very tricky, I was watching it,” he told the press. “The bond market right now is beautiful. But yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.”“Queasy” – more like panicked. Or terrified.Practically speaking, the bond rout means the US government will be forced to pay more to borrow – not an ideal situation while Trump and the GOP push for another round of tax cuts.Regardless, the president’s capitulation reinforced the observation of James Carville, Bill Clinton’s storied political adviser. “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,” he began.“But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody,” including Trump.For the moment, the US appears locked in a battle with China, one of the two largest holders of its debt. Don’t believe there is method to Trump’s madness.“We didn’t have access to lawyers … We wrote it up from our hearts, right?” Trump said of his Truth Social post announcing the pause. “It was written from the heart, and I think it was well written too.”Let that sink in. That’s no way to run an airline, let alone a country. On Thursday, markets gave back a chunk of their gains, the dollar sank and gold rose. More

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      ‘Completely out of touch’: golf and dinners for ‘king’ Trump as economy melts down

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      After lighting a fuse under global financial markets, Donald Trump stepped back – all the way to a Florida golf course. A week later, having just caved to pressure to ease his trade tariffs, the US president defended the retreat while hosting racing car champions at the White House.Trump had spent the time in between golfing, dining with donors and making insouciant declarations such as “this is a great time to get rich”, even as the US economy melted down.It was a jolting juxtaposition that prompted comparisons with the emperor Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, or insane monarchs who lost touch with reality. It also provided a clear illustration of how Trump governs during his volatile and extreme second presidency: erratically, with little attention to convention, and often on the hoof from one public engagement to another surrounded by courtiers who never disagree with him.“He’s certainly living up to the caricature of being a mad king,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “When you’re addressing a ballroom in a tuxedo, telling people to take the painful medicine, or on your umpteenth golf vacation while economic chaos is rippling throughout this country and others, at best you’re completely out of touch.“At worst, you’re a sociopathic narcissist who doesn’t give a crap about anyone suffering. Ultimately there will be a political price to pay for that.”Trump had swerved past April Fools’ Day to make 2 April his so-called “liberation day”. Against a backdrop of giant US flags in the White House Rose Garden, he announced sweeping tariffs – taxes on foreign imports – on dozens of countries, using a widely discredited formula to upend the decades-old order of global trade.Trump did not decide on the final plan until less than three hours ahead of his splashy event, according to the Washington Post newspaper, but found Vice-President JD Vance and other staff constantly deferential. The Post quoted a person close to his inner circle as saying: “He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more. Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”A day later, with markets suffering trillions of dollars in losses, Trump boarded Air Force One bound for Miami, Florida. He arrived at his Doral resort for a Saudi-funded LIV Golf event in a golf cart driven by his son Eric Trump.Trump woke up on Friday at Mar-a-Lago, his gilded private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and donned a red “Make America great again” cap and white polo shirt. His limousine glided down a street lined with palm streets and cheering fans before arriving at his golf club.He also spent the morning defending himself on his Truth Social media platform and vowing to stay the course. “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” he wrote.Trump remained in Florida during the dignified transfer of four US soldiers killed during a training exercise in Lithuania, sending Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to Dover air force base in Delaware to represent him. Instead the president attended a candlelit dinner for Maga Inc, an allied political organisation, reportedly charging $1m a plate.Maggie Haberman, a Trump biographer and New York Times reporter, commented on CNN: “I think long ago he stopped caring about certain optics, and he’s made very clear during this presidency, he’s going to do what he wants … He is not messaging this in a way that suggests that he understands what average people might be going through right now.”On Saturday, Trump played at another family golf course, in Jupiter, Florida, prompting an official White House announcement: “The president won his second round matchup of the senior club championship today in Jupiter, Fla., and advances to the championship round on Sunday.”When Sunday came the president played on even as his cabinet members scrambled to political TV shows and offered conflicting signals, with some insisting that his tariffs were set in stone and others suggesting that he remained open to negotiation.Trump returned to Washington and a growing chorus of dissent from allies, captains of industry and his own Republican loyalty, pleading with him to change course before a potential recession turned into a depression. Yet his first public event was a celebration of baseball’s World Series winners, the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was presented with a “Trump 47” baseball shirt.On Tuesday, in bow tie and tuxedo, Trump told a fundraising dinner in Washington: “I know what the hell I’m doing.” He claimed that the tariffs were forcing world leaders to negotiate with him, boasting: “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.”But the following day, Trump blinked. He posted on Truth Social that, while escalating tariffs on China, he would pause others for 90 days to allow space for negotiation. His bubble of wealth and power had finally been punctured.Trump has often proved impervious to the kind of scandals or gaffes that would damage another politician, but his casual attitude even as the markets were on fire suggested a man uniquely detached from the anxieties of ordinary people, including his own voters.Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Let them eat cake: Marie Antoinette kind of fits. He won his own golf tournament at his own club. How about that? Bill Clinton also cheated at golf a lot and people would let him win because he was president. It’s just the way they are. Rules don’t apply.”This is not the first time that Trump, accused by critics of demanding absolute loyalty from courtiers, pursuing vengeance against perceived enemies and displaying scorn for his subjects, has been likened to a monarch.Speaking at the Politics and Prose bookshop in Washington last weekend, Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist and author of the book Notorious, compared the president to William Shakespeare’s Richard III.“Richard III comes up to the edge of the stage and wraps the audience into the bad thing he’s about to do,” Dowd told the Guardian during a question and answer session. “He tells them and he uses humour so that he’s supposed to be the villain, but the humour kind of counters it so you don’t think of him as badly.“Trump does the same thing … He has this kind of wacky side so then when he does the very authoritarian stuff you get deflected by the crazy side he has. I think the SNL [Saturday Night Live] mimic captures this where he’s sort of being funny, so then when he turns authoritarian, you’re thinking: wait, is he really doing what I think he’s doing?” More

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      Panama opposition party accuses US of ‘camouflaged invasion’

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      Panamanian opposition politicians have accused the US of launching a “camouflaged invasion” of the country, amid simmering discontent over the government’s handling of the diplomatic crisis.After a three-day visit by the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump appeared to confirm that US military personnel had been deployed to the Central American country on Thursday, telling reporters: “We’ve moved a lot of troops to Panama.”Hegseth said that the US would increase its military presence at three former US bases in the country to “secure the Panama canal from Chinese influence”.The last US military bases in Panama were vacated in 1999 as a condition of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter treaties to hand the canal to Panamanian ownership. Under the canal’s neutrality treaty, no foreign power can “maintain military forces, defense sites and military installations within its national territory”, and the US comments have prompted outrage in Panama.“This is a camouflaged invasion,” said Ricardo Lombana, the leader of the opposition Other Way Movement. “An invasion without firing a shot, but with a cudgel and threats.”At a Wednesday press conference to announce the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the US, Panama’s minister of public security, Frank Abrego, said the agreement would not impinge on his nation’s sovereignty and that the country would not accept military bases.However, a full text of the MOU included aerial photos of Fort Sherman, Rodman naval base and Howard air force base, with areas outlined for “training”, “humanitarian activities” and the “installation of US property”.The Panamanian government says they are not “military bases” and that the deal is temporary, but opposition parties have rejected such claims.“If you have an installation which is for use of foreign soldiers and they have control over what happens inside – and Panama has to ask in advance to enter – that’s a military base,” said Lombana.For many Panamanians, the return of US armed forces – even for supposed “joint operations” – will bring back uncomfortable memories of 1989’s Operation Just Cause, when American troops killed thousands of civilians.A second agreement allows US navy ships to be reimbursed for the fees they pay to the canal. That preferential treatment would appear to violate the neutrality treatment and could open the door to further attempts to negotiate down the fees charged by the canal.On Thursday a local lawyer filed a legal case against the Panamanian president, José Raúl Mulino, accusing him of “crimes against the international personality of the state”.Frustration is growing over the government’s handling of the diplomatic crisis. Since Trump declared his plan to “take back” the Panama canal on his 20 January inauguration speech, all communication on the topic has been through Mulino and the details of negotiations kept largely secret.This has led to serious differences in the US and Panamanian accounts of those negotiations. When the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, visited in early February, Mulino told press that the meeting had been “very cordial” and that the canal was not under threat. Later, however, Rubio said the situation around the canal was “unacceptable” and Trump continued to call for the return of the canal.The latest example came on Tuesday when two different statements concerning Hegseth’s meeting with Mulino were published. In the Panamanian version, Hegseth was said to have recognized Panama’s “inalienable sovereignty” over the canal, but those words were absent from the secretary of defense’s statement and Hegseth refused to acknowledge Panamanian ownership of the canal at Wednesday’s press conference. Panama says that the US omitted the phrase from the agreed joint statement.Mulino has also opted to avoid engaging with other countries – such as Canada and Mexico – to gain international support for his country’s cause.On Thursday the local chapter of Transparency International requested on X that Mulino “inform the country of all the details of what is happening, the agreements in process and the pressures he is receiving if that is the case. The country requires transparency in order to achieve unity against this threat to our sovereignty.”Even before Hegseth’s visit, Mulino had faced heavy local criticism for offering concessions to the US without gaining firm assurances over the future of the canal.Two-thirds of Panamanians disapprove of the way he is running the country. In addition to the diplomatic crisis he has passed an unpopular social security reform and angered environmentalists by opening talks with a copper mine closed down in 2023 due to popular protest. He lacks the backing of many of his party’s deputies in congress who are loyal to his political patron, Ricardo Martinelli, who has been residing in the Nicaraguan embassy to escape corruption charges and recently saw his attempt to gain exile in that country rejected.Popular demonstrations against US policy and the handling of the government are expected on Saturday. More